Trysten’s blue eyes snapped open. She peered into the next stall. There, Aeronwind, the iron-gray dragon that led and held the horde together, her father’s dragon, lay curled in a ball upon a heap of straw. She no longer seemed the indomitable, timeless and majestic beast that Trysten had known her to be all her life.
Trysten jumped as around her the tones and notes of the dragons drew together, collapsed from a rolling, swirling song and fell into a single, pulsing beat. One breath breathing. Every dragon breathed in unison as if under a single mind, honed and at the ready as the dragoneer entered the weyr.
The sudden absence of the song left Trysten disoriented. Her own breath ceased, and her fingers clutched slightly at Elevera’s muzzle as if she might grasp the song and pull it back to her. Oh, how she had enjoyed the time in the weyr while her father had been confined to bed, and how guilty she felt for that. But the dragons only sang when he was absent. Now that he was back, she would miss their ever-present song while she did the morning chores. Her hand dropped away from the face of the gold dragon. Trysten touched her fingertips to her breastbone to remind herself to expand her lungs again, to draw the air on her own, to breathe without the dragon horde.
She looked back to the entrance of the weyr. A dark figure stood silhouetted against the morning light. Leaning on a crooked walking stick, her father limped into the building, looking as if he had trekked a long distance, even as far as the mountains that lay gray and blunt along the horizon.
Her breath caught to see him struggle so. She looked away, back to the shadow-strewn stalls and the dragons that still responded to him as if he were the powerful, commanding man that he had been at the beginning of the past fighting season. Even as he limped along on a twisted leg, he was still the dragoneer, the one who had bonded with and rode mighty Aeronwind, the alpha. The horde still responded to him as his own heart did, beating in time, obeying as long as life coursed through him.
The horde did not sing for her father or any other dragoneer. It breathed as one. It thought as one. It stood as one, waiting for the dragoneer’s next command. She would miss that song when she became the dragoneer.
Her throat tightened at the thought and at the memory of that awful day she first told her father she wanted to be the next dragoneer. She blinked hard and drew a long breath through her nose as if she might strike up the song and nudge the dragons to sing, but they would not as long as their dragoneer stood in the weyr.
Her father turned toward the hopper.
“Let me get that for you,” Trysten said as she hurried toward him. If she beat him to the hopper, he’d give her less grief. If he got there first and gripped the handle of one of the feed pails inside, she wouldn’t get it away from him until it sat empty outside Aeronwind’s stall.
“Mind your place,” Mardoc said.
Trysten stopped. Her father continued on to the hopper, pulled the door open, and surveyed the pails inside. He leaned forward and inhaled several times, judging the fitness of the meat. He hefted a pail by its wooden handle, and gripping it in his left hand, limped forward, leaning on the staff in his right hand.
“If Mother saw you—”
“I’d tell her the same thing,” Mardoc said. His back straightened a bit as he approached. Enough light remained behind him that Trysten couldn’t make out his features, but she could still see the pain on his face despite his effort to hide it.
The strain of being out of bed weighed on him far more than he cared to let on. Trysten turned her attention from him to the hopper. This was all about proving that he was still vital, that he was still capable of caring for his dragon. It was what the dragoneer did, and as long as he and Aeronwind both lived, it was his duty to care for the dragon that held together his horde.
“Tell Paege that the hopper is nearly empty,” Mardoc said.
Trysten nodded to the side of the weyr that bordered a small pen. “It’s already being taken care of.”
Mardoc stopped and lifted a heavy eyebrow, visible even in the shadows. “And how do you know that?”
Trysten glanced to her father’s goatskin boots. The right foot still twisted out at an odd, unnatural angle. She closed her eyes against the memory of seeing his leg when she ran to him in the field. When Aeronwind bellowed a noise that sounded like an entire blizzard condensed into half a minute.
They had argued that day before he left for training exercises. Argued about her wanting to be dragoneer. The argument weighed on her as heavy as the weight of his dragon on his crumpled leg. She couldn’t have known how the exercise would end, yet she felt guilty. Why did sticking up for what she wanted always seem to hurt him?
“Trysten,” Mardoc said.
She looked up at him, wide and thick as a wall. The walking staff made him seem smaller. Even if she didn’t look at his feet, the staff always invited her to look down, to see how even her father, the dragoneer, was vulnerable in the end, and his mighty dragon, there behind them, lay curled on a bed of straw, dying.
“Did someone tell you that more feed is being prepared?” Mardoc asked.
Trysten shook her head. Her blonde braids shifted against her vest.
“Then how do you know?”
“The dragons know. They can smell it.”
Mardoc shifted. His grip on the staff tightened momentarily. It betrayed the grimace that he tried to hide in the shadows. She shouldn’t keep him from his work. She reached for the handle of the pail. If caught off guard, she could slip it from his hand, and he would follow along behind her, berate her for taking it while secretly feeling relief.
Her hand wrapped around the handle. She tugged. Mardoc’s grip tightened.
“They can smell it?” he asked. “How do you know this? Did you ask them?”
She waited for a little noise, a hint of a chuckle hung at the end of the question. None came.
The best thing to do would be to let go of the pail. She gave it another tug, added a slight twisting motion as if the pail were a root needing pulled from the rocky soil.
“How do you know?” Mardoc asked.
Trysten looked up at her father. She had grown accustomed to the light and could almost see his eyes in the shadows of his thick eyebrows and bushy beard.
She swallowed. Her heart flitted in her chest as she thought of telling him the truth, again. He hadn’t believed her weeks ago when she told him the first time that she could hear the dragons. Not just their songs, but what they thought. Though it wasn’t quite as simple as that. They did not think in words. They did not think in sound at all. Or maybe they did. She couldn’t ask them. She had no words for it. She just knew. The first time she had told him, he had laughed and passed it off as the romantic imaginings of the dragoneer’s daughter. But he did not laugh when she insisted again that she would be dragoneer one day soon. She worked with the dragons every morning, cleaning stalls, dragging buckets of food and water until her muscles ached. She had few romantic notions about them.
“The way they act,” she finally said. “They’re impatient. They fidget. They can smell the blood.”
Mardoc peered into the shadows, over his daughter’s head. His brow furrowed. His eyes squinted as he searched the shadows for evidence of this himself.
He shook his head. “No. They’re just nervous. Aeronwind’s injury has shaken us all.”
With his staff, he attempted to brush her aside, gently, and continue on. Before thinking it through, Trysten stepped away, out of his path, and as she did so, she twisted the handle on the pail again. With his weight shifted to the staff and his shattered right leg, he let go rather than risk toppling over.
Trysten stepped back half a step to prevent her father from recovering and reaching out for the pail. He continued on as if she had done nothing more than exactly what he had willed her to do.
“Strike a light there,” Mardoc called back.
One of the weyrmen lit a lantern and hung it on a post outside of Aeronwind’s stall. With a glance between Mardoc and Trysten, h
e then disappeared into the shadows again. Soon a brush whispered against the leather of a saddle.
Mardoc stopped before Aeronwind’s stall, set the staff aside, and planted his elbows atop the half-wall. The lantern light fell on his dragon, her breath coming in slow rumbles.
Sensing the dragoneer’s presence, Aeronwind opened one gray, cat-like eye and uncoiled her long neck to stare at him leaning against the stall. If a dragon could smile, then Aeronwind would be smiling to see Mardoc on his feet. Trysten felt the dragon’s joy and relief as Aeronwind extended her neck to the dragoneer. A forked tongue flicked out and landed on the back of Mardoc’s hand as if patting it. Then a sense of sorrow took the dragon. Guilt shook her for not being stronger, not being mighty enough to hold her rider up and protect him. Aeronwind’s regret flooded into Trysten. She covered her lips with the tips of her fingers and blinked away the sudden wetness in her eyes. Mardoc reached out to his dragon as if her drooping head was nothing more than an invitation to scratch her snout.
“There, there, my lady. See? I’m all right.” He scratched at the small scales that covered the dragon’s snout.
“I’m right as rain. A few more days of rest, and then we’ll be up in the air again, you and me, putting terror back in the hearts of hawks.”
Trysten swallowed hard and glanced at Elevera. The dragon’s dark brown eyes did not reflect Mardoc’s reassurances. Instead, Trysten saw only concern and deep resolve. The horde’s beta dragon knew that Aeronwind would not recover.
“I brought you a morsel or two,” Mardoc said. He began to stoop, to reach toward the ground, and then stopped. He cocked an eyebrow at Trysten, who, reminded of the pail, placed the handle over a hook in the wall. Mardoc reached in, removed a fist-sized chunk of meat, and held it out to Aeronwind.
The dragon plucked the offering from Mardoc’s hand with a delicateness that betrayed her size, nearly that of a small cottage. With a flick of her mighty head, the meat was gone. Her eyes tracked from Mardoc’s hand to the bucket.
Trysten pulled in a deep breath in unison with the dragons, and their power and strength coursed through her as well. Elevera stirred in her stall. She swept her head down, reaching behind Mardoc, but not enough to take meat from the pail. The stalls were merely suggestions, a place to shelter the dragons. If they wanted to leave, smash open the hopper, or even exit the weyr and terrorize the livestock around the village, nothing could be done to stop them. They obeyed the alpha, and the alpha always honored the dragoneer to which she was bonded.
Trysten reached for a piece of meat in the pail.
“What are you doing?” Mardoc asked.
Trysten froze, her fingers inches from the food. “I was going to give Elevera—”
“Paege should feed her.”
Despite herself, she let out a short breath that betrayed her frustration.
Mardoc chose another piece of meat and fed it to Aeronwind. “Do you understand? They must bond. They must be ready. The fighting season will be on us soon and … We’ve already discussed this, Trysten.”
Heat flushed over Trysten, baked off her skin and made her scalp itch. The urge to tell him no crowded at the back of her tongue and reached for her teeth, ready to wrench her mouth open and spill it. To the wilds with it. She would tell him again, then and there, that she would be the next dragoneer, that she would enter the consideration and take the title and carry on the family tradition even if he didn’t have a son.
But then her father offered another bite to Aeronwind, and as the dragon gulped it down, he reached up and ran his fingers along the side of her neck. Though turned away from her, Trysten could see enough of his face to know that he felt just as bad as Aeronwind did. He felt as if he had failed her. He should have been stronger. Should have had legs of iron to withstand her weight. Should have leaped off her back, or done a better job of flying. As far as he was concerned, their broken bones were all his fault.
The declaration dried up on Trysten’s tongue. It could wait. There would be time enough to hash it out again. The fighting season was months off yet. It was Mardoc’s first day out of their cottage since the accident. Surely she could wait until tomorrow.
As Mardoc took his hand away, the dragon stretched and lowered her neck, prolonging the physical contact between the two as long as possible. “Have you seen Galelin?” Mardoc asked. He glanced back at Trysten as if to assure that it was she to whom he spoke and not the dragon.
“Yes, a bit ago.”
“Tell Paege to bring him around. I would have a word with him.”
Trysten nodded.
Mardoc gave Aeronwind another bite, then turned back to Trysten once again. “Is there something you need, Little Heart?”
She blushed at the nickname. She was not Little Heart anymore. She was no longer a little girl. She was ready to be the dragoneer. Soon. Regardless, she turned and started up the central aisle of the weyr to look for Paege.
Continue the adventure...
About the Authors
Yes, they’re married. Together, they write fantasy fiction featuring strong characters and hopeful, adventurous stories appropriate for most ages. And of course, dragons.
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The Complete Wisdom of Dragons Series
Dragon's Eye View
Letting Go
Fighting Chance
Hordesmen
The Complete Dragoneer Series
Book 1: The Bonding
Book 2: The Prince
Book 3: Aerona Stands
Book 4: Outposts
Book 5: Between Kingdoms
Book 6: Couriers
Book 7: Emissaries
Book 8: Elevera
Hordesmen: The Wisdom of Dragons #4 Page 16